Two years ago I posted Beam Me Up Scottie. It was about a the raggedy little 5kw radio station where I got my start as a disk jockey and button-pusher. There we faced numerous challenges, including frequent power failures due to thunderstorms; so frequent, in fact, that one of my associates on the FM side once quipped, “someone could pee down the street and we’d go off the air.”
I never quite figured it out. I don’t believe that our chief engineer was necessarily bad. The owners were cheap.
Case in point: one time our studio location (not the tower site) had a power failure that would have crippled us for several days. Our engineer remedied the situation by installing a generator. The problem was that he had to use a very small gas powered affair that was more suitable for a campsite rather than all our office lights and equipment. Every time I played a commercial from a cart machine the audio was comically slowed down and the lights dimmed (the electrical load was just too much for the little putt-putt generator.)
Like a surgeon forced to use a butter knife, our engineer did the best he could with the resources our frugal owners provided.
Stay tuned.
